Use a general purpose language to manage the interface evolution

Many commercial integration tools market their ability to own the integration landscape and call out to general purpose languages as needed. While I can appreciate the marketing behind such messaging — it promotes product penetration and lock-in — as architectural guidance, it is exactly backwards. Instead, we should almost always manage the interface evolution in a general purpose language for at least two reasons: so we can better manage the complexity of maintaining a clean interface, and so that we avoid the gravitational pull of our tool's mental model when making strategic integration decisions.

more…